(The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go
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TO see work that has something to do with the life of the place it comes from
is no small thing. Today, at least as the self-styled art-critical vanguard has
it, nationalism in art is a thing of the past. Artists the world over are
presumed to speak the same post-Postmodernist language and to address the same
postcolonial concerns, whether the subject is "narrative," "the body," or
"meaning." Possibly because the main commercial market for the work of young
British artists has been European and American collectors, there has been
something of an attempt to peddle that work on the basis of this international
language -- a strange Esperanto that few but insiders understand. Also, of course,
young artists are eager to be perceived as international rather than local
talent. But none of this changes the fact that British art enjoys a definite
advantage -- especially on its home turf -- because it also speaks plain English.

One may illustrate this by pointing to any number of artists at work in London
today. Mark Wallinger made his name in the early 1990s with a series of
conceptual projects having to do with bloodlines and class; for one of these he
bought a racehorse with a consortium of collectors and ran it under the name
A Real Work of Art. Tracey Emin is little known here but is a mainstream
star in Britain -- largely for moving autobiographical performances and videos in
which she speaks frankly about, for instance, her adolescence as the town tart
of Margate, one of the seaside holiday spots that are the butt of many a joke.
The artists who find inspiration, as Richard Hamilton so famously did, in that
ubiquitous English subject the home are legion. Simon Periton makes objects
such as gates, masks, and safety pins out of intricately cut paper doilies.
Stephen Pippin has reinvented photography by turning washing machines and
toilets into neo-Victorian long-exposure cameras. The painters Gary Hume and
Ian Davenport are renowned for their use of gloss house paint. Even Rachel
Whiteread, Britain's most eminent young sculptor, began by making models of
hot-water bottles, sinks, and bathtubs, eventually working her way up to
casting the interior space of a living room and later an entire East End row
house.

Such work, deeply grounded in British preoccupations, is fairly easy for the
average person to understand. When the auction house Christie's rearranged its
sales categories last year, it designated all such art "Brit Pop." Yet the work
I see in London often seems to hark back to a more fundamentally populist
commandment: Find art in everyday life. The results can be strangely
enchanting.

Consider Cornelia Parker, who -- reprising an old Surrealist idea -- recently showed
some "automatic" drawings she had made by polishing several tarnished silver
objects and framing the cloth. Anya Gallacio, known for working with flowers,
in one famous piece carpeted a museum floor with 10,000 red roses; more
recently she used glass crystals and white light to raise a rainbow in a
gallery. Tacita Dean, who makes drawings and films having to do with ships and
tales of the sea, once supplemented her oeuvre with a video in which she and a
friend execute that old folk-art trick of putting a ship in a bottle.

IT
seems odd that pop art should suddenly be flourishing in Britain now, because
it never really has before. Except for a handful of painters, including David
Hockney and Peter Blake, pop in the sixties became a largely American movement.
Much of what we now think of as British pop was hammered out by former students
of British art schools who went into some other field: retailers and fashion
designers such as Terence Conran and Mary Quant, and musicians such as John
Lennon and Ray Davies. Today more graduates of those same art schools seem to
be making their presence felt as visual artists. Perhaps that's because art has
finally reached a point at which most of its usual forms jibe surprisingly well
with things the British tend to be good at already.

Think of the ongoing vogue for performance art and installation art, which
dovetail neatly with national pre-eminence
in theater; or the mind-bending
gyrations that conceptualism can require, which are hardly outlandish demands
on an audience already acclimatized to puns, word puzzles, and acrostics. How
logical that the ready-made object, an idea that has animated art since Marcel
Duchamp showed that famous bicycle wheel in 1913, should find renewed life in a
nation practically blanketed with historically charged artifacts and
antiques.

Nothing, perhaps, expresses this consanguinity so neatly as "editions" -- any
artwork produced in quantity, such as prints, artists' books, or the small
sculptural objects generally known as multiples. Editions, which have been
produced since casting and print methods were invented, during the Renaissance
and before, boom whenever artists concern themselves with making art for the
masses (Arts and Crafts textiles, Art Nouveau posters, 1960s pop prints).

Editions rose again in early-1990s London -- this time as something small and
cheap enough to make by hand on a recession-era budget. Sarah Staton, who runs
the editions project SupaStore Deluxe, noticed that her friends all seemed to
be making multiples and trading them among themselves. Staton herself, then on
the dole, was working on a project having to do with traveling sales: every day
she would pack her own small artworks into a valise and shop them around to
London dealers. "It came from trying to reknit life experience back into art,"
she once explained to me. "It was a kind of game." Somewhere en route she
decided to sell her friends' work, too, and SupaStore -- a traveling project that
has journeyed throughout Britain and to Europe and New York -- was born.

Staton stocks such ephemera as artists' magazines and artist-designed
phonecards and T-shirts.
She also shows more rarefied multiples whose aesthetic falls somewhere between
collectibles and the sort of prosaic household wares one might find on a London
market stall. Recently, for instance, she was showing Elizabeth Le Moine's
doll-sized coat hangers and plastic beach balls, housed in jewelry boxes. On
another visit to SupaStore, I fell in love with (and bought) a tiny hand-bound
book by Mark Pawson, which compiles the many unstandardized wiring diagrams
that come packaged with British electrical plugs. (Fortunately, the most
populist thing about multiples is that they're often quite cheap.)

Whereas multiples incarnate the blithe intermingling of commerce and art that
characterizes today's London scene, they also bring to mind the time when the
city's art market first began to swing -- in the early eighteenth century, when
Sotheby's, then a fledgling auction house, was set up to deal books; English
artists first clubbed together to create a market for their work; and the canny
artist-entrepreneur William Hogarth made a pile by selling prints of his
paintings -- those famously satirical vignettes of London life. It doesn't seem
at all surprising that London's yearly artists' book fair, held each fall,
should be the brainchild of Marcus Campbell, who for years has co-run a
rare-book shop in the Piccadilly Arcade (he is opening his own shop in the
Bankside area, a growing arts neighborhood). One of the city's hippest editions
publishers has been Ridinghouse Editions, run by Charles Asprey -- "of the
Aspreys, you know," someone always seems to mention when his name comes up,
referring to the well-known jewelers, founded in 1781. Until Ridinghouse closed
up shop recently, Asprey did a tidy business in limited-edition books and
prints, as well as editioned film and video. Once, with Abigail Lane, an artist
whose concerns are often described as "Gothic," he produced a short 16mm film
of moths circling a naked bulb. An earlier and more notorious Ridinghouse
project was a blue video by the Chapman brothers, starring two Soho ladies of
the night and a sculpture of a sex toy modeled after an Italian dealer's head.

A few multiples publishers eschew commerce entirely. One is Matthew Higgs, the
publisher of the cult editions project Imprint 93. The idea came to Higgs five
years ago, when, stuck in a dull office job, he looked around and suddenly
realized, as he recently told me, that "there was this amazing amount of free
equipment to be appropriated." Office supplies were diverted to his friends,
and the resulting artworks were distributed by mail, thanks to the office
postage meter.

Higgs mostly produces photocopied books. My favorite, by Hilary Lloyd, notates
in a deadpan, anthropological way the male come-ons Lloyd gets in the street.
Other pieces simply point up the nature of paper: one, by Ceal Floyer, is a
single book-sized leaf with one corner dog-eared; for another Martin Creed
wadded a sheet of typing paper into a ball.

Higgs, who no longer holds that office job, now finances Imprint 93 himself,
and plans to post the fiftieth element in the series -- in an edition of about
200 -- this year. Yet all this time, he says, his runs have never been sold; you
can acquire them only if he sees fit to add you to his mailing list. "It's an
informal network that grows quite naturally," he told me, "in the way that your
address book grows as you meet people." The only requirements for inclusion are
that he meet you by chance and that you do something that interests him. The
British Library is collecting the series, but that's because Higgs ran into,
and liked, a curator there.

With its subversive, underground quality and its distribution by mail, Imprint
93 has clear roots in Fluxus, a sixties movement that aimed, among other
things, to make art that couldn't be commodified. (Yoko Ono, who was in Fluxus
when she met John Lennon, is probably its most famous member.) It strikes me
that Imprint 93 also trades in a fundamentally British coin, by being something
that money can't buy. And those who ended up on that very limited mailing list
made it into the right club.

ANOTHER key to art's popularity in London is that people outside the art
world have ready access to it. The most interesting work is often shown not in
some central gallery ghetto, as it might be in New York, but in outlying
neighborhoods. City Racing, for instance, an artist-
run
space in South London, has mounted many legendary shows in an old betting shop
near a cricket ground. (It will close this fall.) Hales, a commercial gallery
even farther south, is tucked into the basement of an unprepossessing
café. The Cabinet, until recently in Brixton, a West Indian
neighborhood, once hung a show of portraits in the local pub. Interim Art,
which helped to spur the East End boom, is in the dealer's own home -- one in a
street of identical row houses in a working-class neighborhood.

I once tried to explain the thrill of this to a friend in New York, who nodded
and said, "I know -- guerrilla spaces." At the time, I agreed. As I've thought
about it since, though, that combative characterization hasn't seemed right.
When there's a gallery in the local High Street, chances are good that people
who live nearby will stop in to visit. Besides, such galleries, no matter how
subversive they may intend to be, fit into an established history. That many of
London's most important public galleries are in outlying neighborhoods is a
legacy of the late nineteenth century, when the burgeoning middle class
broadened the market for English work; founding free galleries for the benefit
of the urban poor became the philanthropic thing to do. The South London Art
Gallery, where many important shows of new art are now held, was built in 1891
as the pinnacle of a campaign to bring civic focus to a dreary, rapidly
expanding urban neighborhood. The Whitechapel Art Gallery, another avant-garde
stronghold in the East End, opened in 1901 after a twenty-year
crusade by a consortium of worthies who sought to present contemporary art to
the working masses. Their success resonated even fifty-five years later, when
the Independent Group mounted "This Is Tomorrow," its bid to bring art to a
broader audience, at the Whitechapel.

There are those who believe that because the current London scene is so deeply
rooted in the past, it can't really be considered modern. Certainly those roots
negate the notion, so often used to hype British work, that the art coming out
of London today represents a complete and shocking break with history.
Marketing a movement on the basis of sensationalism is one of the oldest tricks
in the book. But that populist bedrock is what's likely to keep art in London
swinging on, long after the hype has passed it by.